INNOVATIONS IN PEACH POSTHARVEST RESEARCH AND STORAGE TECHNOLOGY

Current consumer preferences, hand labor costs, and global markets are forcing changes in the breeding, production, and delivery of fresh peaches and processed/ minimally processed peach produce.
Over the last 20 years, the peach fruit quality concept has evolved from large bright red color fruit to a flavorful, healthy, ready and easy to eat, safe peach with high consumer acceptance.
Breeding efforts using new genetic pools are being carried out to develop peaches that ripen uniformly in the canopy with diverse predominant visual, shape, flavor, and texture attributes; and physiological traits at ripening that are adapted to minimal processing.
The peach genotype and phenotype expression diversity, especially related to flesh softening, ethylene production, browning development, and wound responses, can be utilized for prolonging storage/shelf life and minimally processed products.
For example, different melting level types (none, soft, firm, very-very firm), slow ripening (SR), and stony hard (SH) genotypes are interesting biological sources for the ready-to-eat produce concept.
Because of recent advances in new nondestructive sensor technology and the long-term lack of peach flavor in the market, there is high interest for using nondestructive sensors online to segregate fruit according to their postharvest/shelf life potential and consumer acceptance.
However, the use of nondestructive sensor technology to segregate cultivars prior to consumption should be focused on flavor and loss of flavor.
Furthermore, consumers should be willing to pay a premium to justify the extra cost of using any new nondestructive sensor technology.

VIII International Peach Symposium

C. Crisosto, P. Tonutti

consumer acceptance, genotype-phenotype diversity, minimal processing, P. persica, nondestructive technology, quality assessment

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2015.1084.111